News From An Acorn

Gift of storm and sand

In our area Hurricane Irene got demoted to tropical storm Irene, with modest amounts of rain and winds that could have been far worse by anyone’s measure.

For those of us who live on the coast and frequent the ocean regularly, Irene also left a little gift in the way of sandy little mounds just off-shore beyond the low tide mark. The reshifting of sand, which amounted to little plateaus thirty feet off shore,  changed the topography just enough to provide unusual little pools of of water that attracted hoards of hermit crabs, small fish,  living conchs and of course alive and robust grandchildren.

Rather than just sit on the beach and watch, we dragged our chairs and coolers and whatnot to the center of the action. At dead low tide, there we were, sitting in our little paradise just off-shore. While the storm caused damage elsewhere, here,  on this south-facing beach in Fairhaven, between the rock weed on one side and a jetty on the other, mother nature stirred everything up, creating a smorgasbord of sustenance for things that crawled, swam and flew overhead.

There is a briny, salty smell that lingers along the shore when storms like these roll through and leave. Things look and feel different. Partly stirred and scuffed and strangely cleaned up too. It’s as if the dunes and rocks and shorebirds are at rest, are calmed and quiet and breathing easier after the roar of the day before.

Around my feet, while sitting in the luxury of my chair on our twenty-foot island, hermit crabs scurried about in water only inches deep, leaving little “crab trails” in the watery sand as they scooted about. To my left a conch raised itself off of the bottom and began moving slower than slow, and upon sensing the shadows of grandchildren watching close by, stopped and dropped stone-still, until the threatening forms dashed off to discover new delights.

We adults, as grandparents and parents, take in and savor the seaside for all it’s pleasures. But children, all children it seems, are able to blur the lines without effort between their human world and that of the sea and sand and wind all around them. In their beautiful skins they swoop and splash and dig and crawl about as if, for a time at least, they belong to the wet and wild of the shore. For them, like the periwinkles and salty air, there is no time, no clock, no this or that. There’s a tugging, a genetic homecoming that flows without the need of being taught or told. It  simply is. They are not wet and visiting, it seems, but rather are here, belong and fit in perfectly.

It’s amazing the things one sees and understands while watching hermit crabs at work.   

It was just an ordinary day on one remote little beach. It didn’t make the news.  the Weather Channel truck was long-gone too, apparently uninterested in the rest of the story, the post-hurricane party in the salty pools and clumps of seaweed washed ashore and the gulls that feasted with abandon through the pickings.

But nothing stays as is. Soon the incoming tide reclaimed our sandy island inch by inch. The chubs and blue crabs found their siblings and beyond the rocks, a quahog, exposed by the shifting bottom around it, exhaled and breathed anew the tide’s return and got scooped up by a hovering gull, got dropped, broke open and was eaten just like that. The sun, now low in the western sky served to remind parents that tomorrow was coming fast and that beach bags would be swapped for backpacks and the first day of school.

We dragged our chairs and gear (and took the children too!) back to the seashore, packed up, headed for the path and left this timeless beauty once again, promising to return.

Kevin Lee    

    

Back To School, Continued

It was mid September when the high school guidance counselor called asking if I knew of Matt’s whereabouts. It seems he never showed up when school began two weeks ago. Efforts to find him, or even to get his step-dad to respond to calls from the school, wasn't happening either.

In July Matt texted me saying he found work helping a local lobsterman doing day trips. I had the boat’s name still on my cell, but not its location. Matt’s doesn't have much family, and I also knew that his stepfather couldn’t care less whether or not Matt ever returned to school, so I focused my efforts on finding the lobster boat instead. A week later I finally spotted Matt off-loading traps from his boss’s truck onto the back deck of the boat. He seemed glad to see me and oblivious to why I might be stopping by.

“So here you are!” I said, trying to appear more casual than concerned. “You’re still lobstering?”

“Yeah, how ‘bout that?” Matt said. “I’m fishing and stashing cash in my pocket, too!”

“You like it, then?” I asked.

It’s pretty good. My boss is cool and pays mad good, too.

Sweet… so Matt, what about school?

Oh yeah….that., he says, as if it were a brand new thought.

Yeah that….you’d be a junior this year. Don’t you want to get at least a high school education?

Oh…I planned to go back…just not yet…been out everyday…the catch is good right now.

Doesn’t your boss know you’re still in school?

He sorta thinks I finished high school.

You mean you told him you graduated, right?

Yeah. You gonna tell him?

No. You’re nineteen, damit…you’re making life choices right now.

Matt continued off-loading traps as we spoke.  After heaving eight or nine more traps, Matt said,

“I’m not sure about school, Kev. Look, I’m 19 and still in high school for Christ’s sake. If I go back I know how it goes. It’s all good for three weeks. Then I start mouthing off, get pissed, get suspended, loose more time and just keep falling further and further behind. Fuck, why bother? It’s not like I’m going to Harvard, yah know?”

But you need a basic education, Matt, unless you plan to flip burgers for a career.

I’ll fish… I’ll do what I’m doing now… just stay here and keep working.

Where you staying? You stepfather doesn’t seem to know where you are

He doesn’t give a damn where I stay or what I do, Kevin. You know that.

I know…but your mother did? If she were here, would you be dropping out of school?

But she ain’t here, is she? So what’s it matter now?

Sensing that the tenor was going south fast, I tried another angle. “How about night school then?’ I asked.

Thought about it. Maybe.

I was about to follow up on night school when Matt’s boss walked up. “You friends with Matt”, He asked?

“Sure  am. He’s a great kid,” I said.

He’s the best damn worker I’ve ever had,” he said. “Always on time, quick learner, easy to get along with. Matt, we set to go?

All set boss.

In a flash the lines were dropped and the lobster boat backed up and out of the slip. Matt waved in my direction and yelled something I couldn’t make out.

As the boat went out of sight I thought, best damn worker, always on time and easy to get along with? Maybe Matt was going back to school after all?

Kevin Lee

 

Old Dories

You never know what interesting stories lurk in the shadows of a boatyard.

It was race day, early March, and my five rowing teammates, waiting for our start-time, had scattered here and there attempting to block the winter wind that was rolling off the water.

I found my spot between the stern of an old dry-docked and rotting dory and the weathered old boathouse. I had a notion to get off my feet, huddle up and rest before our pull across the bay. I no sooner picked my spot to do just that when I saw another man, ten feet over, who was flipping up his parka against the wind when something orange flew off and landed at my feet.

“Sir! You dropped something,” I said, as I picked it up and handed it to him.

“Thanks, lad,” he said. “I’d be lost without this. It’s my shellfish license. Been raking littlenecks for over sixty years.”

And he continued, the two of us standing there between the evidence of time and age.

“My wife thinks I’m nuts,” he said. “Me, at eighty-four years of age, still going in the water up to here, pulling on a rake.”

“You’ve got twenty-four years on me,” I said. “I doubt I’ll be shell fishing at your age….good lord…”

“Well if your ass is in a chair all day, no way. You gotta be moving,” as he pumped his arms back and forth, like he was raking up a catch.

“Hell, I’ve worked the docks for fifty years in those god-damn freezing ice houses, lump’n boats, get’n all wet year in and out. At least when I get in the water now it’s cuz I want to!”

“Man,” I said, “that work’s tough on the body…the bones... and you look great.”

“Well, truth be known the vodka kept me warm down on the docks when it got cold. I even smoked a pile of pot with the younger boys to make the days go by. I’d smoke a Lucky, then a marijuana cig, like that, all day. Crazy.  But vodka’s better.”

“God’s been good,” he tells me. “I wore out this shoulder,” pointing to his right one. “But the rest of me, I tell yah, works just fine.”

My new found friend leaned in closer, resting his hand upon my shoulder to punctuate the punch line to his story.

“And I still have sex! Honest. Not lying. No Viagra crap either. Wife says something’s wrong with me, a man my age, chasing her like that around the house. I don’t know,” he says, raising up his chin and brows to look me in the eyes.  “I just been lucky, real lucky, I guess.”

“So remember lad. Drink a little, get a little, work hard. It’s good. You’ll see. What time’s your race?”

 

Kevin Lee

Thoughts of Japan

Some of the good people who visit here know that I sometimes write about being on the water and rowing with my team, the “Gray Buzzards.” (We row whaleboats, twenty nine feet long, three days a week early in the morning in and around New Bedford Harbor.)

The other day, when it was my turn to steer the boat, I asked my teammates to pause for a moment of silence and reflection, with a heavy heart for the many lost and suffering people in Japan right now.

We, our team of ‘over fifty” types, at this time and place, have the very good fortune to be able to be out on the water, on this calm and balmy day in March, with the sun just rising in the east. And we row, for recreation and camaraderie, breathing in all we can see and feel and know. It is, for sure, a balm and a blessing.

And yet this same water, this mighty, thrilling ocean, half a planet away, has proven deadly, menacing, raging and fierce beyond all imagination. Geography, circumstance and just plain luck may separate us, but it is the same ocean.

And those lost and those suffering Japanese people, and we in our boat, are also the same, as one human family, all brothers and sisters, too.

I pray that mercy and hope and healing may come.

Kevin Lee

Lookout from The Southern Cross

 
I’m guessing they call this house “The Southern Cross" because that’s what you can see here, high, at night on this ocean-side bluff on Palm Island, the Grenadines. On a hill in a house, where you can see nothing but magnificent ocean on three sides, it seems strange to name a place after a constellation of stars instead of what gloriously intoxicates the senses hour after hour.

There is a wind, the Trades, as locals call it, that sweeps across the aqua colored Caribbean water and slams into the bluff and lush of green that sways back and forth all night and day. This wind would make the news back home. But ask local folk who belong here about their wind and they pause and look outward beyond their island, as if reading something, and say, “Yes. It is like this now…windy”, then they smile.

Even the course pinkish sand is shaped by what the wind may want, rolling and pushing it up along the tideline into bits of shells and coral chips the sea has left behind.  What grows with abandon here is sturdier, more so than lush, with eucalyptus, palm and gnarly grass and moss that stubbornly holds this storied place together. The pirates have long since  gone, and the only captain, as in Captain Morgan, rules the course ahead as dreamers watch the surf and furl that rolls from nearby reefs.

Visitors who come and stay and stay again do so for the majesty of place not palace. And somewhere out there the Wind knows this too, as the waves keep laughing and the spray annotates whatever life that dares to dance,   a proper lookout from what’s above or just beyond in a symphony of surf and starry splendor.

 

  

 

 

 Text and photos by Kevin Lee

What’s In A Day

I have been working with, and caring for people most of my adult life. That fact, by itself, isn’t such a big deal. What is worthy of  pause and reflection, however, is that I’ve had the privilege of being employed in “paid” work, and, within unpaid settings of ministry among Quakers and non-Quakers alike in tandem for as many years as well. The two experiences mesh seamlessly together most of the time but every now and then something stops me in my tracks.

Last week was a case in point when I had to pull off the road at the end of the day to take a call. (I dislike driving and being on the phone, especially when I need to think and feel what’s going on at the other end of the line.) The call itself, actually, wasn’t out of the ordinary, but the way it fit into the day’s events, was. Let me explain:

The day began like any other, meeting first with an eight year-old child and his mother, and afterwards with just the boy. We talked about the hurts of life, about special people he had lost, feelings of loneliness, and making his way in the world.

We also explored the future. He wants (like so many boys these days) to be a firefighter, but maybe a shuttle pilot and live in a big city with tall buildings. He wants a motorcycle too, because his dad had one once, which then made him sad. But soon we talked about ice cream, wanting the snow to melt so he could play baseball, and the girl who keeps staring at him in school. Our session ended with a picture he made with red and black markers. I taped it on my “picture wall” and off he went into his world and back to school. Twenty minutes later the boy’s mom called and said that she left his next appointment card in my office. I gave her the date and time and we hung up.

Other appointments followed, including one with a sixteen year-old and her two-year old daughter. There were similar themes, hopes and fears and plans about the future, for the young mom and for her little girl as well.

The day ended, or so I thought, visiting a man who is two years shy of his one hundredth birthday. And in essence, we talked about hopes and fears, loneliness, losses, people we love and miss, and wishing the snow would melt so he could get outside more frequently. I read  poetry to him from books he had selected from his bookcase. Afterwards, he showed me the signatures of famous authors who had autographed each volume just for him. I asked about old framed photos on his wall and tabletop. He explained each in careful detail which was difficult and “good’ to do. My elder friend, in his wheelchair, saw me to the door as I made my way down the ramp and to my car. I looked back, we waved, and I was off.

An hour later, on the side of the road taking a call…it was my elder friend’s caretaker, who then handed the phone to my older friend. He said, “What was the name of the book you told me about?”

“The Kabir Book,” I said. “And you’re going to bring that book on your next visit, right?”

“Right,” I replied. “Okay, thanks, see you then.” and my friend hung up.

For certain, my friend had other reasons for calling. I knew that, as I sat there , cars whizzing by for several minutes holding the day in awe, the spectrum of life from one end to the other with nothing to do but offer a prayer of gratitude for living and witnessing to, what’s in a day.

 

Kevin Lee

August Sands

August flies. And before we know it the carefree days of drip-castles, beach shovels and cooling dips in summer surf will be a fading memory.

But today, children reign along this beach. We’re talking serious holes being dug. Water by the cup and bucket gets carried by a band of four-year-olds on a relentless mission, back and forth, to a sandy hole that never seems to fill.

This beach, in all directions, is packed with solid material for a study in human behavior. This is the real laboratory.

Maddie, age five, scans the scene and commences to dig ever so methodically. She’s humming something as the excavated sand gets stacked beside her right knee. Cousin Josh appears with heavy equipment, a bigger shovel and joins in. Sand flies and the hole deepens as Maddie, now sitting with sandwich in hand, directs the whole operation.

Neighbor Frank comes here too. He’s seventy-seven and arrives for a swim every day. “Got the whole thing timed just right,” he says. “I get through the village just before the bridge opens, have my swim, chat with a few friends and leave before it opens again. I hate waiting. Always did,” he says.

Then there’s “he and she” who come to the beach and try their best not to touch it. They arrive pre-oiled in mail order bodies. They came to bake and be seen. You have to admire their determination as perfectly cornered blankets, weighted down with Keens and Berks, marking out their territory. As if following some predetermined tanning program, they expose every skin surface just so, turning like skewers timed on a grill. Then suddenly they’re up and start whisk-grooming every speck of sand off of feet and chairs, flex, nod, load the BMW and drive away.

From a distance, my eye follows the graceful jog of a teen-aged couple as they effortlessly prance on by, weaving playfully in and out with every breaking wave. Suddenly, they both turn sharply together, laugh and crash face first into the cooling ocean. They rise, embrace, oblivious to others, then swim away to join their friends.

Back at the salt creek, another granddad has the kids today. He balances attention between his book and grandchildren who frolic in a stream of knee-deep water. Dozens of hermit crabs are temporarily held hostage in rows of orange buckets as net wielding boys forage about. The late afternoon sun glistens off their perfect bodies in an endless dance with nature.

Here, August lasts forever.

There’s a sense of timeless rhythm here. A healing short-lived balm where no one speaks of mortgages, jobs or waiting school books just around the corner. 

The daytime sun begins to yield to shadows. A wisp of beach plum fills the air. Offshore a halyard clangs and bangs. Seagulls hover, regroup and slowly take the beach again. A mother calls to pack it up and gathers toys and towels and children from an invisible radius she alone can see.

Maddie, who looks like “Shake and Bake,” with sand from chin on down, loads her rocks and shells and something else that smells into the beach cart as her family’s slow exodus begins. At the nearby parking lot car doors slam to the sound of voices asking, “What’s for supper?,” leaving behind stillness, footprints, an inching tide and perhaps a promise of one more day.

River Dance

It is late October. At five-thirty in the morning it is still very dark and night-like. But I am making my way down a narrow wooded sanctuary path at the Lloyd Centerand headed for a dock and waiting whaleboat along the Slocum's River. 

My head lamp guides my way and helps me dodge some of the protruding roots, stumps and rocks that work to hold the earth and me back in whatever way possible. In the midst of this gentle and pristine quietness it is apparent too, that I am not alone. Ahead, left and right,, forest creatures scurry under brush, and something with wings flaps upward into higher branches as I make my way. It becomes obvious that the "clink" of stones underfoot and the bailing buckets I am carrying are making too much noise, so I slow my pace and choose my footsteps, trying to be a less intrusive visitor.

The trail winds left and right, then over a rise into a tiny clearing that in predawn darkness requires choices of which way to go next. I've learned to just keep bearing right which dips down alongside a gloriously aromatic saltmash, where woodland yields to marsh grass, tidal pools and open water. This ancient intersection, especially at this hour of day, dissolves any sense of urgency I might have and stops me silent. Here, in this reverent moment hints of dawn and red begin to lighten the eastern sky. The far-off squawk of gulls and the stirring and clacking of nearby waterfowl in inlet pockets makes me appreciate that many besides myself are poised to rise into a brand new day.Slowly, if not somewhat reluctantly, I walk onward as the path opens to the river, wooden dock and waiting row boat.

Ten Thousand Sunrises

I took this picture as our rowing team, the Gray Buzzards, was preparing to take off on our usual 5:45 AM row, this time out of Padanaram Harbor in South Dartmouth. Being on the water this time of day, with the sun creeping up over the eastern sky and the (typically) prevailing gentle morning sea breeze, ...almost everything you see, hear and smell at this time of day nourishes and feeds the senses. This day was no exception.

Only minutes before, the sun wasn't up yet. And because I had just literally walked the length of the dock while setting up our boat at the other end, the seagull wasn't there either.  I had barely unloaded some of our rowing gear from the back of my van when I turned and noticed the rising sun. There it was....the sun, the seagull, and the silhouetted dock and pilings in all their glory before the rising sun. I dropped everything, grabbed my camera, got the shot and then it hit me.....

Musing the Can

I row on a team with other guys three times a week. On my non-rowing days I walk along a shore road, around an old fort, and loop back for a 2.5 mile brist walk very early in the morning. Last week the wind was howling and it was bitter cold as well so I kept my ski cap on and hood up from start to finish. As most people know, sounds are muffled when your ears are covered and that, coupled with the nylon hood flapping madly in the wind added its own demention of distraction. Still, I kept hearing this far-off "tinkling" sound